


all work

by silentwalrus



Series: caveat emptor [8]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Ed Elric College Boy, F/M, Gen, M/M, Slice of Life, ed: could an unsatisfied person do THIS?, fuck around find out: an intro to studying poetry, heart herpes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:21:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29739348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: “So,” Al says, somewhat philosophically. “That could have gone worse.”Ed, having just recounted the events of the past seventy-two hours - during which he had been soaked, arrested, and shown the inside of a cop shop twice and Al had stargazed, brunched and probably calligraphed reciprocal love poetry on Mei’s ass - can agree with that assessment only intellectually. Emotionally, he wants a fucking do-over.
Relationships: Mei Chan | May Chang/Alphonse Elric
Series: caveat emptor [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790881
Comments: 42
Kudos: 184





	all work

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for aetataureate for beta, she is a miracle pouring gasoline on this trashfire. title from lil bebe by danileigh
> 
> tags will update.

“So,” Al says, somewhat philosophically. “That could have gone worse.”

Ed, having just recounted the events of the past seventy-two hours - during which he had been soaked, arrested, and shown the inside of a cop shop twice and Al had stargazed, brunched and probably calligraphed reciprocal love poetry on Mei’s ass - can agree with that assessment only intellectually. Emotionally, he wants a fucking do-over. 

“Coulda gone _better,_ too,” Winry says, whapping the back of Ed’s head on her way back from the teakettle. “Don’t fight cops, Ed, it’s _not_ hard.” 

Intellectualism does not win out. “They _started_ it!”

 _“Ed._ Do you really think your friends wouldn’t rather deal with a couple of seconds of grabass than a week in lockup?” Winry plunks her tea down, exasperated. _“I_ would. They’re big boys and girls, they can take it. I don’t _care_ if the cops started it, you can’t finish it. Right now you’re nobody.” She fixes him with a firm look as she pulls out a chair. “Be smart about this. Let the General handle it. That’s what he’s _for.”_

Ed wants to argue, but she’s right and in any case if he opens his mouth right now the only thing that’s gonna come out is psychotic hissing. “You said he told you to work with Ms. Dianne, anyway,” Win continues. “If you want to take this on, do that.”

“You should at least stop using animals for your criminal activity,” Al adds. “It’s not fair to take advantage of them just because they think you're one of them.” 

“Hey!” 

“He’s right,” Win says reprovingly. “You can’t set Chowder loose in a police station. What if she’d gotten shot?” 

“You joking? She chased a squirrel through ten blocks of Garret Row backyards last week and half the fucking neighborhood shot at her! Not a scratch!” Ed jabs with his spoon for punctuation. “And _inside_ the cop shop they’d be a lot more careful about pulling guns, they know they’re more likely to just hit each other if they shoot.” He’d also been planning to do something short, sharp and alchemical to their bullpen, but nobody needs to know that. “I’ve done worse stuff. Shit, _Mustang’s_ done worse stuff - he set a _serial killer_ loose in a _prison,_ where the fuck does he get off slapping me for one little dog in a police station?”

“That was because that lady was going to be _executed,”_ Winry says, unknowingly echoing Mustang and proving the bastard right. “Aline’s _purse_ wasn’t going to be executed, it was just gonna get shaken down a little. Now a whole bunch of other people are involved in this, some of them people you don’t even know, and you’re _not_ making it better.”

“At least you know the General,” Al says, echoing Ed’s thoughts from that night. “If he said he’s handling your records, we can probably just leave it to him. He’s covered alright for us before.”

Mei takes that moment to shuffle out of Al’s bedroom, revealing some really impressive bedhead along with the fact that she and Al are back to wearing matching pajamas again. Al wraps an arm around her waist and she leans against him, and they sort of just coexist for a second like some sort of statued ideal of couplehood, haloed in sunshine. 

Ed wonders what Mei will throw at him if he tells her her pajama top’s inside out. “The bastard can handle what he fucking likes,” he mutters. “It’s not gonna happen again, alright? I _know._ It’s not like I _wanted_ to get arrested.” He drops his spoon on the table, the last couple of oats in his plate note even worth prodding at. “Shit just got outta hand.” 

“Do you want us to go public again?” Al asks, watching Ed over his cup. “Eventually.”

Ed has to sit back and rub his face. He really hasn’t thought about it. Going to Xing, working with Al, starting university - sure, they’ve had to work around the fact that they’re kinda sorta living under fake identities plenty of times, but it’d just never really felt like too much of a concern. After all, what did he care? Al had his body back. They were turning to the future, no longer trying to fix the past. They’d _won._ The practicalities of how they needed to maintain their anonymity felt about as weighty a consideration as figuring out what kind of socks to pack for their trips.

What that means, however, is that Ed’s ‘death’ is an extremely rickety tower of bullshit that he, Al, Winry, Granny, Teacher, Mustang and probably Hughes haphazardly slap some duct tape onto whenever the occasion necessitates. It’s not a conspiracy so much as a sort of deliberate accident. And it’s about as airtight as a colander, as last night made so very clear.

But it’s not like Ed has a better alternative. He stares blearily over his fingers at the shaft of sunlight highlighting the teapot. “If we did. I feel like shit would get. Crazy.” 

Mei snorts. “Of course it will. Why be famous now? It just will get you followed to classes and to your apartment and fill your life with creepy stalkers.”

“Winson’s already asking a lot of questions about you,” Al admits. 

“Who?” Ed says blankly. 

“Al’s friend who was with us. Honestly, Ed,” Winry says, though without much heat. “Remember those people I told you about who wrote to me and Granny about you and Al while you two were in Xing? Some of them even showed up, all the way from Central, just to ask about you, and that was when nobody was even sure you were dead yet. If you just pop back up all alive again you’re not going to be the only one with creepy stalkers.” 

That’s true. It’s why Ed called Mustang from lockup in the first place. Ed and Al can slip off to Xing or Creta or honestly wherever else, but Winry and Granny have a business to run and Mustang’s stuck like a planted tree. Enough people in the general public and the military both know that the Fullmetal Alchemist had Rockbell automail at a family discount to go and harass them about it, and while Mustang can definitely handle a little poking and scandal he does actually have more important things to do. 

“Besides,” Win continues. “Fullmetal was pretty well known for his automail arm, and _you_ pretty clearly haven’t got one. We can spin some horsefry about Al having slimmed down some or whatever from when he was in the armor, but do _you_ have a story ready for how you’re the first person in the world to de-amputate himself?” 

_“I_ didn’t do that,” Ed defends, pointing his spoon at Mr & Mrs Soul Sacrifice Is A Fun First Date Idea. “That was all _them.”_

Mei gives him the kind of look that says she’s been more impressed by dead slugs. Win gives him a not much better one. “What!” Ed protests as Al rolls his eyes, entirely unhelpful. “It’s not like we _expected_ for everybody to decide we’re dead and then get all religious about it.”

“Then there’s your answer,” Win says with finality, Mei nodding at Al’s shoulder. “You aren’t prepared and you haven’t got any kind of plan. Work out how things should go before you make any big decisions, ‘cause I’m pretty sure if you don’t like how things end up it’s gonna be a lot harder to fake your death a second time.”

Ed groans and wishes his plate was still full of oatmeal so that he could stick his face in it and drown. They’re right. Fullmetal is not something Ed can _afford_ to forget. He may have retired the red coat and Al may be armor free, but it’s not like their past is a costume. The things they’ve done and been aren’t something other people are just going to set aside behind them, even if they have. 

Al does the washing up, because Ed cooked, Win bought the groceries and Mei doesn’t touch things in the kitchen unless they’re handed to her for her enjoyment. Win’s already half out the door and Mei’s disappeared into the bathroom for her usual ten thousand years of primp anyway, so Ed’s free to slope over and jam his face against the back of Al’s shoulderblade. Al being taller than him again is equal parts fierce pride and constant indignity, but it does mean Ed can slump his whole weight on him without worrying he’s gonna topple him facefirst into the sink. 

“Your guppies were right, Al.”

“Oh?”

“I’m a violent, unhinged felon.”

“This must be very difficult news for you,” Al says, in the staid tones of respect that mean he’s twisting the mickey outta you. 

Ed halfheartedly digs a knuckle into the back of Al’s kidneys in return. “What the fuck’m’I gonna do about it?”

“Don’t get caught.”

_“Wow.”_

Al shrugs, making Ed’s face ride up and down, amusement in the line of his shoulders. “You could try making bread.”

“Making bread,” Ed repeats blankly. “To… bribe…? The police?” He has a mental bird’s eye view of himself traipsing down the street with a baguette in his back pocket, just in case he gets stopped by some officers, but honestly, even in his head that ends with him hurling the loaf at a cop’s face, so he’s not entirely clear on the concept here. 

“No, to work out your energy. Bread involves a lot of kneading and things. I’d normally advise more physical activity for someone like you, but I know your schedule and frankly if you spend any more time in the gym it’ll be your legal residence.” 

“Whaya mean, _someone like me?”_

“A violent, unhinged felon,” Al says patiently. “Ed, we _are_ living outside the law, however unintentionally, even if everything looks normal on the outside. It’s really not a good idea for us to have any kind of run-ins with cops. We have to do things differently. So don’t get caught.”

 _“Gnrrrgh,”_ Ed posits.

“And you should learn to cook anyway. Campfire doesn’t count.”

Ed unplants his face from Al’s shoulder in indignation. “I can _cook!”_

“You can spit things over a fire and peel vegetables. It’s not cooking if there’s only one ingredient.”

“Hey! Who the fuck made your oatmeal just now, the fucking stove fairies?”

“Two ingredients isn’t much better,” Al says pityingly, like it’s not _Ed_ who got the dried apricots and almonds and jaggery for the table. 

“See if I ever make you a fucking sandwich again, you ungrateful toad.”

“I’m saying you should get good at other things. If you eat nothing but takeout and Choko bars while I’m gone I’ll call Sig on you.”

“Oh my god, Al, I’m not gonna _die_ just because you’re in Xing.”

“I know what happens when you get left alone, brother. I’ll come back to your hair grown to your ankles and the university burned down and Winry literally possessed by some demon with even worse dress sense than you -” 

“Don’t compare me to _Ling!”_ Win hollers from Ed’s bedroom. “Just because he got me a snake _one_ time -“

“You should be more concerned about what the fuck Mustang’s gonna pry outta my hide for bailing me,” Ed complains, before Win can get started. They haven’t really mentioned that they were sprung on the assumption that they were extremely inept junior sex workers, because Win’s polite and Ed knows better than to speculate about what Mustang might like to do with his dick in front of his little brother. “I woke him up at like three in the morning for it, he’s gonna lord this over my head fucking forever.”

Only it turns out Mustang isn’t pissed about the arrest thing at all. 

Mustang doesn’t so much as send him a telegram, after Ed gives him the ticket numbers and Aline’s info. The DAT itself goes off without a hitch: Ed shows up to court, spends seventy minutes in line and about seven seconds in sentencing, pays the fine on the spot and leaves, now the proud owner of a shiny civil violation. Not even a misdemeanor. 

Ed does call Mustang about Dianne, after another week goes by and damn nothing, but it’s a two minute conversation that establishes that between the three of their schedules they’re going to have to move mountains to get anything to line up before May and that it’s not urgent enough that they can’t wait. And then he and Al are swept off their feet with work, in and out of the city with all the requests to handle the irrigation expansion and repair callouts brought by spring flooding, and Ed forgets all about it until the pig happens. 

He’d almost think _Mustang_ forgot - the guy _does_ have a much bigger day job these days - only Mustang doesn’t just fucking _forget_ people owing him and especially not when it’s Ed. But he’d just… not seemed to care. He’d burned the fucking debt on _making Ed promise to get help._ To bug him _more._ That’s a weird fucking scheme any way Ed looks at it, because it’s not like any of Ed’s current problems are _important._ Getting arrested _is_ an anomaly. So what’s the catch?

Maybe it is the day job. Ed’s gotta admit he’s kind of a smaller crisis these days than, like, all of Aerugo. Only if Mustang’s so busy with real shit, why the fuck invite Ed to pile on _his_ problems as well? As a distraction? He’s aware Mustang isn’t anywhere near as lazy as he makes himself out to be, but it’s not his style to make _more_ work for himself either. 

Whatever it is, Mustang isn’t telling Ed outright. Which - stings, kind of. You’d think after all the shit they’d backed each other for, if Mustang’s running a new scheme involving Ed he’d at least come out direct and _say_ it, if only to keep Ed from blundering around fists up. You’d think he’d have learned from what happened with Lieutenant Ross. _Ed_ did. That’s why he’s going to trust that Mustang’s got a damn good reason for not just fucking spelling shit out for him on this one. 

Of course, Mustang’s also a fucking moron. His capacity for really fucking clever shit seems to be equally proportionate to his ability to make the most boneheaded decision possible under certain kinds of pressure. But Hawkeye hasn’t even left the city recently, and it’s not like Aerugo’s, like, _invading,_ so what gives?

Whatever. Ed’ll find out when the other shoe drops. 

In the meantime the end of the semester is coming on like a freight train, which mostly means everyone around Ed is winding up like a clock spring while he largely resigns himself to being cried on by everyone Tracie snitched to about him being capable of organic chemistry. At least he only has university three days a week since he’s not taking any mathematics, science or technical classes, though gymnastics is every day and work can be irregular. It’s not like Ed’s employable as any fucking thing else, so he’s working as an alchemist - a nice, boring regular one, with circles and chalk and a letter of recommendation Teacher scared out of some construction firm in Dublith. 

So he’s got a real job. As part of the whole lying low thing after having been front and center in the almost-apocalypse, Ed and Al don’t have, like, an office. Instead of starting up an Elric Co. or whatever when they moved back to Central, they joined the fledgling Civil Engineering Collective instead: a pool of alchemists licensed to work as civil contractors and tapped specifically by the state for construction and design. He and Al get a call if there’s a job that fits their listed profiles and availability, and they decide whether they take it or not. 

It’s got more bureaucracy than Ed ever encountered in the military, and his work badge features a photo of him with his hair soaked because they wouldn’t let him just hold his bangs back and nobody had pins or anything so he just had to dunk his head in the bathroom sink, but if he doesn’t want to do a job he can just say no thanks and not have to worry about Winry getting kidnapped or something in return. As jobs go, there’s definitely worse. 

The paper-mazing can get kind of annoying though. The CEC’s got admins to do all the stuff like invoicing and negotiating rates with clients, and all Ed and Al have to do is show up to the relevant job sites and go to town. This is definitely a point in favor of the not running your own business column. On the other hand, when there _is_ stuff they have to do themselves - fucking security clearance badge photos - they gotta go in and wait in line and get batch processed with everyone else. _Civilian_ alchemists don’t get a fancy watch that jumps them to the front of the line. 

Today, though, Ed’s just picking up some project briefs and dropping off paperwork for Al. They’d mail it, but the office is on Ed’s way to the university and it’s better they do it the faster way anyway, because when Mei’s leaving for Xing at the end of term she’s taking Al with her. 

So Al’s taking a leave of absence for the next eight months, which mostly just means being taken off the official availability roster and a note that he’ll have to retake his qualification exams upon his return. It’s objectively a lot fucking less than what the university wants, which is to unenroll Al completely and have him re-enroll when he comes back, but still fucking annoying; Ed used to be able to tell the State Alchemy office toodles and jack shit and just drop the fuck off the grid for a year. Admittedly, that’s probably the kind of dedicatedly stringent oversight that led to monsters like Shou Tucker turning his wife and daughter into horrific experiments, but it’s not like _vacation paperwork_ is going to be the last bulwark between an alchemist and crimes against humanity. 

Especially not _here._ They do _construction work._ They follow _zoning regulations._ For anything that isn’t the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster Ed might as well be a glorified cement mixer. 

Ed swings by the mail room, empties the cubby marked _E ELRIC_ and stops briefly by the design offices for his weekly wrongly delivered mail swap with Eidwar Elric. After a brief altercation with a secretary - something about how this would have to be filed as medical leave because it’s too late to submit it as just time-off paperwork which means these are the wrong forms which means he has to fill out new ones - “Elric? You’re Elric, Edward T.? _You owe me three months of expense reports” -_ Ed manages an exfil, dodging a troop of junior architects struggling under a massive scale model that definitely looks avant garde enough to be for the fanciest of the six other firms sharing the building. 

And that’s just the bottom three floors. The price of having a downtown location is that the CEC is crammed into one corner of a building packed full of design and construction headquarters, all of them booming given the endless infrastructure renewal necessitated by the earthquakes. They’re right across the Lane Canal from both Parliament and Central HQ, nice and convenient for all those working lobbyist lunches, so on his way out the front doors there’s a whole pack of guys in fancy suits going in, coiffed to the eyebrows. As Ed squeezes past, for a split second he gets a faceful of cologne. 

His lungs drag in deep, pure reflex. He catches his head before it starts to turn, but there’s no escaping that that’s reflex too, wired in to chase after the scent. It’s not even the right smell. It’s just similar. Same brand, maybe, just without the molecular interaction happening at skin level that makes every person’s scent unique even if they’re wearing the exact same perfume. Body chemistry. A boring, normal reason, for why no one else will ever smell like Mustang. 

Ed’s well aware he’s got more than a few wires crossed, but he’s pretty sure that this is one of the most normal of his misfiring connections. Everyone has crushes when they’re kids, especially on cool older teenagers or competent adults. And while Mustang was never under any circumstances _cool_ , he _was_ in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that happened to be ground zero of Ed’s first hormone rollercoaster.

Ed’s pretty sure this was one of the ways his body had tried to develop some teen angst, only the apocalypse was kind of happening at the same time and things sort of cancelled out. He hadn’t even fully understood what the fuck it was at first - a magnetic, almost fearful pull, hot with anger and indignity: how dare Mustang do this? How dare he make him feel this way? It had manifested in a lot of embarrassing yapping, but whatever, Ed hadn’t had the toolbox to deal with it back then. Mustang wasn’t like any other man Ed had ever met: sleek, styled, arrogant enough to give even Ed a run for his money, as rich and connected and powerful as they came to a sheepland brat who’d never been further than Dublith. A man for whom nothing seemed impossible, not even the idea that some shitass little kid could spit at god thrice and unvaporise his little brother. 

But the initial seismic strike of it hadn’t lasted long, what with Ed having actual shit to do. It eventually sorted itself into the appropriately embarrassing category. As for the damn cologne - scents carry memory, more than any other sense, and Ed’s got a pretty good nose: when he thinks of people, when he smells something, the memory’s tied in along with the colors and sounds. Teacher and Sig ran a butcher shop, and besides that Teacher always smelled a little bit like blood; Granny and Winry’s house is all pipe smoke and antiseptic and oil. If anybody in Resembool tried to use cologne they’d have to find out what it was first, and in any case no one would be able to tell under the sweat and wool and sheep medicine. So when Mustang showed up and made his goddamn impression - it was just new, that was all, a brand new thing landing hard right at a time when Ed’s whole body and mind were primed to let it leave a dent.

But that was a long time ago. At this point, having a crush on Mustang is like having herpes: it’s not special, it’s not unique, Ed just got it when he was young and dumb and now he’s stuck dealing with the occasional flareup forever. 

Luckily for him, redirecting the urges is not a problem. 

Almost everyone in university wants to fuck, even though a proportionally inverse number of them can communicate this information. This also applies outside of university, though lately the thought of having to go through the song and dance of going out is starting to tire Ed. He still _wants_ it, sex is effective even when it’s not all whooping fun, but going through all the motions in between is definitely becoming a chore. Which it wasn’t before. So what changed? Why’s he getting bored? 

He’d try and talk to Winry about it, but she’d probably just tell him to get a real love life and stop going to the kinds of bars with ram skulls and mining hammers nailed up over the doors. Explaining how that’s definitely not the problem will probably just get him called a slut, which, okay, isn’t _inaccurate_ but is also the only category worth occupying right now, to his mind. Ed’s _seen_ people date. The standard approach is not gonna work for him. He’s pretty sure he’s not capable of middle gears, to start with: if he _does_ date he’s gonna take it seriously, which means - a lot, from explaining all his everything starting with the necromancy and ending up at how he’s pretty sure he’s a sneeze away from fucking off to Creta for six months at all times, civil unrest or no. 

Besides, if dating is just liking someone, wanting to fuck them and spending a bunch of time together, he and Landy have been going steady for the past semester. Hell, loosen the time and space constraints and he and Winry never broke it off at all. So whatever it is that’s missing - it’s something else. Something more. Something that makes him _want_ to talk about the necromancy, maybe. 

Besides, he doesn’t think his known acquaintances deserve him strip-mining his way through them in search of - what? Emotional connection? He’s _got_ emotional connection. He _likes_ his friends. He’s not going to lead them along on the promise of maybe something more when he already knows the scope of potential between them. And he meets plenty of people, through work and traveling and just walking around, so it’s not like he’s lacking in sample size for the data pool. 

Then again, it’s not like Winrys and Lings are a dime a dozen. Maybe he just needs to be patient. Maybe look in different places. 

He has thought about it. Sounding Mustang out. The guy definitely dates around - mostly women, but the collective consensus seems to be that the important criteria is _blond._ Sometimes Ed has dangerous little thoughts like _hey, if_ _he’s looking for something, maybe I could be the one to provide._

Thank fuck Ed has his dignity. And that the crush mostly manifests as incoherent urges to upend something expensive and staining all over Mustang’s stupid shirts. Frankly, the fact that Mustang’s well aware and so thoroughly doesn’t give a shit is reassuring: he looked Ed’s painfully obvious teenage mess full in the face and didn’t even find it worth mocking. Much like everything else, he just carried on with his life and expected Ed to be fully capable of dealing with his own bullshit. 

It had been a relief, when Ed first realized that Mustang never would pay him that kind of attention. Freeing. It’d let all that shit settle off in the background, which was great given Ed couldn’t exactly afford to be distracted, and it’s really only cropping up now because Ed’s single, stuck in Central and slutting his way through, well, anyone in reach. Fuck. He’d say he used to have standards, but given he punched out his V-card face-first against a tree in an ethically questionable threesome with an illegal immigrant and a homunculus while on the run from the government, the size of the lie would probably crack the pavement he’s standing on. 

So here he is, disgruntled and undistracted and poking at something that quite honestly might just turn out to be some kind of extended PMS. 

The worst part is he _wants_ to talk about it. This is annoying on multiple levels. Ed’s usual first stop for talking is Al, but this is not one of the things Ed and Al talk about, probably because the two of them had to sit through each others’ puberty and sex lectures from Teacher. (The one at seven wasn’t bad, but the one at seventeen went on for three hours and made Ed seriously consider chewing off his recently regained arm to escape. Teacher is a big believer in candidness, honesty and personal anecdotes to illustrate specific examples.) It’d stopped Al teasing Ed about people he likes, but since it’s been replaced by offhand medical facts about horrible venereal diseases Ed can’t strictly call it a net benefit. 

He knows what Al would say, anyway - he and Win are on the same socialization kick, and while Al’s largely bemused by his poetry decisions Ed’s also aware that nobody’s poking him about his future because they all think they already know what it is. Alchemy, what else. Construction, what else. Not like there’s a shortage of work to go around, what with the earthquakes, and he’s been with the CEC almost three years now without blowing anything up. Mustang’s the only one who keeps asking if he’s bored, which - he’s _not,_ there _is_ plenty of work to do, he’s not some dumb fucking kid who can’t sit still anymore and anyway the last goddamn time he had an actual idea instead of just reacting to immediate problems, he got a bunch of limbs ripped off. He’s gonna hold off on poking at any of the really shiny thoughts for a while. 

Mustang’s the one who goddamn _started_ him on poetry, he thinks moodily as he joins the stream of people entering the campus gates off the Promenade. Maybe all his _are you boreds_ is him just checking up to make sure whether the bone he threw is still keeping Ed’s attention or not. He’s clearly aware it’s a finite thing, too - Ed graduates in a year if he sticks with it, and it’s not like he’s gonna get a _job_ with his degree. He probably _is_ gonna end up just doing alchemy. 

Shit, maybe end up like Teacher, if he combines Win and Al’s socialization program with a ‘career’. Get married to someone with a real job, split his time between house chores and fixing local shit and fuck around traveling the rest of the time. He probably would’ve been doing that already, if not for how Winry loves just didn’t match up with him quite right. 

He slopes into class a minute before the bell, stumping up the tiered seats to the back. Aline’s in this one, along with a bunch of her friends Ed vaguely knows from previous lit classes. He hasn’t seen her out of her usual gear since that night with the cops, so there’s no skin showing beyond face and fingers and her makeup makes her look like a very expensive raccoon; next to her, Tracie pushes a chair out for Ed with a boot that looks like it got dipped into a vat of superglue and thumbtacks.

Ed settles in among them and leans back, getting as comfortable as it’s possible to get in the ancient wooden student desks. It’s one of the rare times he disappears within a group, at least: these kids do a lot of their own creepy staring and half of them smile never as a matter of personal pride, so even if Ed’s making no effort to brighten his expression it doesn’t really stand out. Or bother them, given Tracie’s idea of formalwear includes milk-white lenses for her irises that make her look like a haunted corpse and were definitely done by some alchemist who charged a fortune. These guys know what fucking looks cool, even if they sometimes take it seriously in a kind of overdone way. 

It’s not like they’re annoying about it, at least, Ed probably never would’ve picked up on it if they hadn’t had to all read each others' work last year, but now that he has he can’t un-know what they write about, or the correlation to the rest of how they put themselves together. It’s a little… silly, this sort of fascination with their own pain, but not so much that Ed’ll laugh about it. He thinks a past version of himself might’ve been derisive, but as it is he’s mostly just bemused - at them, at the ever more inventive outfits, at the same past self who had no idea he’d grow into the spikes he’d pasted all over himself. He can’t make fun of their carefully constructed exostructure, not when he knows what it’d take to harden it for real. 

Still, poetry is something Ed has not figured out yet, which is why he’s still in these classes. Historically, doing his own research and figuring things out on his own has worked pretty well, but with this stuff it’s like the more he reads the less he understands. He’d always known that books are wonderful and dangerous, but after _Across the Ages: Amestrisan Poetry Anthology 1720-1900_ he’s arrived at the conclusion that _real_ poetry should be a Class A controlled substance that shouldn’t be released to the general public. No fucking wonder the censorship office can get away with banning all sorts of shit and telling people it’s for their own good. There’s this guy from like three hundred years ago who was a soldier, and he was in like three of the Campaigns during the time when Amestris was taking the biggest chunks out of its neighbors, and he kept journals and wrote about the stuff he saw and put a lot of it in verse; there’s a Reform-era lady too, who wrote these short little things about practically everybody she knew dying of the plague. And Ed doesn’t fucking know how they did it, but somehow Sohrug describing the night before a dawn raid or Cavenna writing three lines about a pair of shoes that would never be worn again makes something twist inside Ed like a trapped animal. Reading through that anthology was awful. He couldn’t put it down. He also hasn’t been able to touch it since, which is kind of a problem given it’s a library book, but he knows for a fact they have three more copies and it’s not like he can’t afford the fines. 

He’d be blaming it on the hormones, only he knows what the _real_ endocrine uppy-dippiness feels like from when he started T and all he has to say is thank fuck he did his first year in Resembool, where he could pick a tree and do pullups until he stopped emoting. This isn’t that. He hadn’t fucking _known_ there was this well inside him, undredged, a blind place somehow reachable by fucking high school lit level poetry compendiums. He hasn’t been a crier since his automail surgeries - those early weeks, he’d done nothing _but_ cry, sobbed himself straight out, and since then it’d just always been gone, like the mechanism had been exhausted. And up until all this poetry shit he’d thought it was permanent: he gets mad before sad, always, and he’d feel the prickle in his face sometimes, but mostly it just stayed stuck. 

Not anymore. Now his face is a goddamn watercourse, suffers flashfloods without warning, like all this time the water was building and building somewhere up high above in the atmosphere and has now finally begun to discharge with a vengeance. And he does usually kind of feel better after, cleaned out, but it’s always just - a lot. Winry said once she cried for him and Al because they couldn’t, and now every time Ed’s face goddamn gushes he has the absurd urge to demand how there’s any tears goddamn _left._ Win cried so much, surely she must have emptied the well years ago, before Ed could even cry again at all. How can there still be more? How deep does it _go?_

It just makes no fucking goddamn sense. His life is _good_ now. Nobody _else_ is crying for him now, they can see he doesn’t need it. 

And there’s no way to tell which bits are bearable and which will drag through him like a harrow plough. He can read about messed up shit on top of messed up shit, got through all those Bradley papers just fine, and then four sentences into a verse about a fucking vegetable garden slowly being overgrown will send him for the fucking tissues. It’s not even like they _had_ a garden to abandon, he doesn’t _care_ about gardens, Mom wasn’t any good in dirt and didn’t like it either, they traded for all their vegetables, there’s absolutely _nothing_ there for Ed to be sad about, so - why? What fucking sense does it make? What goddamn stimulus are the words connecting to?

Even _happy_ poems will do it to him sometimes. There’s been absolutely no pattern to it that he can predict. Literature is fucking _witchcraft._

The deceptive, double-edged nature of it does make him wonder, sometimes. He can’t help but think if maybe somehow Mustang knew, when he suggested it, that poetry would bring the tears on like a flood. That there was something out there that could make Ed spend hours on the kitchen floor with the lights off, staring at the ceiling, salt leaking down his temples from a pressure inside him too big to come out any other way. It’s a weird, irrational thought to have - it’s not like he thinks Mustang _wanted_ him to _cry,_ it’s not like it’d bring him any use _-_ but Ed had dropped himself into Mustang’s office that day so frustrated that maybe Mustang thought this was the only other way to blow off the visibly gathering steam. 

He has a hard time imagining Mustang lying on any floors; any time he tries to picture it all he can see is Mustang getting back up. But how else could he have known? 

Al found him like that, once, and after a few stumbled words of Ed trying to get up and explain something that’s objectively nonsense Al just turned the lights back off and lay down next to him, hooking their elbows together. Al gets it. Ed didn’t make him read the poetry book, but he did tell him about it, in the same kind of way that you tell people where you saw a landmine in case they might want to go walk there. Al can decide for himself whether he wants to go poke that with a stick. 

And the Professor Colton likes to poke _Ed_ with a stick, because apparently he spoke to Professor Renz from poetry last year and _they_ spoke with all the professors from when Ed _was_ taking sciences and now the entire faculty all probably circulate helpful little memos with Ed’s mugshot alongside notes like _evil! evil!_ and _learn the face of the devil._ It’s a little frustrating - it’s not like Ed _meant_ to be an asshole that first semester, he’d genuinely done his best on those early assignments, but Renz had been such a stuck-up jackass that he’d had no choice but to dig in, and now Colton here has taken up the torch and, well, it’s not like _Ed’s_ gonna be the one to lose, even as he’s becoming increasingly sure that when you’re squared up against poetry there’s no actual winning. 

At least he hasn’t cried in class yet. It’s not exactly a high chance, given that the stuff they actually go over in here is an extremely narrow band of safe topics thoroughly approved by the Ministry of Culture’s literature committee, but Ed can’t promise himself it’s zero. Still, this is where sitting with Aline and the others comes in handy; it’s hard to look at them all the way in the back, and he’s pretty sure if he did start leaking everyone in this group would just politely pretend they’ve all gone spontaneously deaf and blind. 

Class ends without Colton provoking a deathmatch, so Ed sails on to Contemporary Literature (five hundred kids in a stadium lecture hall), Critical Reading 2B (political essays, usually from no less than three hundred years ago because the faculty in this place would prefer not to be arrested) and Amestrisan Working Class Literature (books about farming. It’s hilarious) without a hitch. Then he’s free to go to the sciences buildings and wait for Landy and Brinley to stagger out of organic chemistry, shellshocked and supporting each other like wounded soldiers, and head to the campus gyms. 

The Central U gymnastics team drills as a group, which reminds Ed of the Xingese Imperial Guard despite the absence of masks and armor in one and peppy gymnasium-ringing songs in the other. He’s found he likes it a lot, even though it also reminds him of every time he ate dirt in the palace training grounds while Lan Fan ground a knee into his back; it turns out there’s a lot of finicky little details in gymnastics, performance as fine-tuned as calibrating an array, and doing it right takes focus and practice and splatting into the mat again and again and again. The team trains to compete, so it’s a lot of splatting. 

Ed does not compete, half because automail and half because there is a uniform. The uniform is Amestrisan green and white and has the national lion on the back, which is enough of a disqualifier for Ed even if wearing it _wouldn’t_ make him look like an anemic carrot. Having a group photo where he’s the third tallest guy in the team lineup is not worth it. 

“Not that you’re up to code in any case,” McKenna tells him, clapping him on the shoulder. “Like, point your fucking toes once in a while, Elric. I _know_ you’re capable.”

McKenna is a monster. Ed is semi-excused from heavy cardio due to his leg, and it’s not like his fitness is actually going to affect the team’s standing, but McKenna is some kind of demonic drill sergeant reincarnated into the body of a five foot two leotard mannequin and during the group drills she maintains herself as god. Ed _still_ can’t believe Aline’s her twin: Aline thinks confrontation is sacrilegious and McKenna would probably melee a mammoth with a muffin tin if given half an opportunity. Ed had the halfhearted thought that maybe he should look into who the Tovilles are after getting arrested, what with how Mustang made note, but applying two braincells to the problem makes it pretty clear that they’re military children and honestly Ed doesn’t need to know more than that. He already gets McKenna in his face enough about his eating off diet and his split ends; asking around about her and Aline is only gonna get him dye in his shampoo with a bonus chaser of people deciding he wants to fuck them, and that’s the last thing he needs going around. He and Al get enough creepy twin comments when they’re sitting next to each other that he’s got a pretty clear idea of how things will go. 

Once the group drills are over everybody scatters, dispersing themselves to the various equipment according to whatever they’re working on today. Ed generally trails at the back to let everyone else pick their setup first, because _he’s_ not here to win competition money. Coach Yarushin is the only one who’s really invested in what Ed actually gets up to, since there’s kind of no point to training him when there’s twenty others who _do_ compete and need the attention. She does actually want him to improve, or at least not die too messily under circumstances where she’d have to provide witness testimony, so she makes him wait so she can spot him on the bars and doesn’t leave him alone for a second if he gets anywhere near the rings. 

She knows his right arm is fucked up - and Ed had had to feign total idiocy over medical terminology, because she’s wanted to know the exact injury and every single thing that’d been done to treat it and he can’t exactly say _well my arm fell off and then kinda fell back on again._ That’s the kinda shit that leads to questions. He’s had to call up Winry and between her and Granny they decided ‘construction accident’ was their most plausible excuse, where he could say his shoulder got impaled by a stray chunk of metal or something to account for the nerve damage and choppy muscles and reinforced collarbone. 

Yarushin bought it, which is pretty good considering she actually knows what an acromioclavicular ligament is, and she and everybody else also seem to have decided that’s what chopped off his leg too, so it hasn’t really come up since his initial assessment. That means Ed gets to spend the next two hours falling off the bars, falling off the beams, falling off the vault and absolutely eating it on the horse until Yarushin takes pity on him and lets him retreat to the trampoline, where he can fall at a much higher velocity but directly into a foam pit. Brinley eventually joins him, then Chal, and they have an interesting few minutes where they see how far they can throw Chal if Brin grabs his arms and Ed grabs his legs and they swing really hard before they all get yelled off it and onto the mats to unfuck everything they fucked up over the course of practice.

Ed _is_ getting better, at least. He’s allowed onto an actual beam now instead of the baby tape line, for one thing. Eventually he’s gonna stop falling off the stupid horse, and get to do more than just absolute baby stuff on the rings, and then everyone just better watch out because to even get there he’s gonna need the upper body strength of a fucking god. 

He doesn’t get out before half to nine, because post-practice is a locker room steam haze of callus beeswax, body tape and complaining, and then Brinley gets his bag caught on his locker edge and tears the whole thing open and the resulting cavalcade shreds the cover and spine half off his giant chemistry textbook. Everybody nearby and not half-stuck in their leotard immediately clusters around him to help him pick up his stuff, so Ed snags the stricken book and says something about having some tape in his bag and retreats around one of the partitions, letting the fluorescents and the clatter and hiss of the showers cover up the crackle of alchemy. 

“Oh, man, thank you,” Brinley says, visibly relieved when he brings it back, good as new. “Shit. I thought I was gonna have to… How’d you do that? 

“It looked worse than it was,” Ed tells him, because he does still feel kind of bad about having gotten Brin arrested, even if Brin was so drunk he straight up doesn’t remember it. “Just don’t open the cover too hard, you should be fine.”

He also feels a little bad about relying on the fact that Brinley won’t ask any questions, largely because he won’t be able to come up with any, but it’s not like it matters when Brin cheers right up and goes back to talking about how his baby sister got a new gerbil. Ed helps him rig up his ripped bag so all his stuff won’t come spilling out, listening and mostly wishing he could just clap again and fix the bag too. It’s not a new annoyance, but it chafes a little more given the recent bullshit. It’s an inconsequential little thing, it’s not like Brin’ll up and die if his bag doesn’t get fixed right away, but if it _were_ something bigger - and there will be, sooner or later, Ed can’t kid himself and say there won’t - he’ll have to react. A train will crash, a work site will collapse, an earthquake will hit Central. Hell, a haywagon will overturn, like it did for one of Winry’s new customers last week. And right now, Ed doesn’t have any kind of plan for the fallout. 

He’ll talk to Mustang about it. When they finally hammer out that meeting with Dianne. He wants Ed’s problems, he’ll fucking get them. 

When Ed gets home Al’s still in lab, Mei’s out and Winry’s out doing whatever the fuck she does in Central’s machine yards, so he takes a couple of wild stabs at his homework before moving on to the much more straightforward briefs he’d picked up from the CEC office. Out of everything happening in the next fortnight, the most interesting project is a sewer repair and water main replacement: standard work crew stuff, only when he flips further he sees it’s practically around the corner from Central Command, and they’re working at something like sixty meters deep. No wonder they want an alchemist - _everybody_ knows about the subterranean levels below HQ now, and after the ‘alchemical disaster’ of the Promised Day absolutely nobody wants to fuck around down there without specialists, or at the very least someone they can blame if shit goes wrong. 

Ed taps his pen on the brief stack, thinking. He’s probably just being overcautious, but after the stupidity with those cops he doesn’t want to be the idiot just blundering in without at least trying to think through any potential consequences to his identity. Command wouldn’t be inviting civilian alchemists to fuck around underground if they were going to be working anywhere classified, but there’ll almost certainly be a couple guys from the military engineering corps there, supervising the city construction crew, and if Ed’s gonna get off the wall recognized by someone, showing up to Central Command to go _hi, I’m an alchemist!_ isn’t gonna help his chances any. 

But Ed’s worked _in_ HQ before, when Mustang needed those Bradley files sorted, and that worked out fine. He _had_ run into someone who thought they recognized him then - one of the National Librarians, a woman who’d worked with Schiezka and who’d seen him in and out of the shelves a lot - but he’d just made himself puzzled and polite when she’d stopped him with a “Wait - aren’t you…” until she trailed off and gave an embarrassed smile and told him she’d mistaken him for someone else. Winry’s right, too - all he’ll really need to do to prevent confrontation about it is make sure he’s wearing something with short enough sleeves to make it clear he’s got two flesh arms and a high enough collar to cover the port scarring. A chunk of Mustang’s inner office in HQ _does_ know who he is, too - Peters, for one thing, who’s Havoc’s buddy from East and recognized Ed dead on sight, and Anje and Khozhaq, whose reward for serving with General Armstrong on the eclipse was getting transferred somewhere warmer and whose punishment for the temerity of requesting to leave Briggs was having that transfer be to Mustang’s bodyguard detail. They can be relied on to cover if necessary. Looking polite and puzzled can go a long fucking way. 

Moreover, if this project were actually important, Mustang would’ve called Ed himself: this site wouldn’t have been opened to repair at all without being scouted by a patrol first, and if _they_ found anything it would’ve been kicked up to Mustang. Since it hasn’t, the most senior person he might run into would be Armstrong, and the guy can, actually, be relied on to be discreet. Ed calls and puts himself on the project schedule. 

So that’s his week sorted. He cleans up, eats a sandwich, gets in bed. 

On the whole, shit’s fine, really. Ed has friends, and stuff he likes to do, and a good job doing good work. When Al leaves for Xing, he’s not gonna worry about Ed at all. 


End file.
